I’m looking to buy some 20tb drives to upgrade my NAS. It currently hosts a 12x3tb striped mirror setup on Truenas Scale plugged into a NetApp DS4246 24 bay. It is backed up elsewhere.
With how large HDDs and even SSDs are getting I would only need a mirrored 20tb pair to cover my current data and have quite a bit of open space left yet. (Like double) Eventually it will grow though. My backup uses a Rosewill case with 15bays. It seems ridiculous to only put two drives in a 24bay shelf. Even if I use another Rosewill case and put 14 drives in it, in a striped mirror setup that is 140tb.
Is it worth using the extra power of the shelf vs just a Rosewill case and some lsi cards? I wouldn’t even need the lsi cards just yet. I’m contemplating selling the shelf and current drives and replacing it with 4 20tb. A mirror on the main setup and a mirror on the backup in two Rosewill cases. I do realize I lose the redundant power supplies.
(I realize that people in the data hoarder category are in a different situation but I don’t plan on having 140tb of data in the near future.)
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I have done both. In your case there is no point in a shelf and it just takes up extra space and power. That said there are more than a few shelf’s that only use about 25 watts empty. The LSI cards use around 10 watts. And then spinning rust uses well 5 to 10 each drive. For all the SAS card haters mother boards with lots a sata ports need extra controllers as well and the crappy ones take even more power. If you build a large drive setup disk shelf’s allow you to expand easily and without adding more motherboards which also take guess what… power! As far as noise goes most of the shelf’s suck but some can be made to work without rocking your ears. But more power more heat more cooling.
Well that’s at minimum 70W-100W. Insane how cheap larger drives are getting.
Another reason not mentioned for having more disks is IOPs
For when you need performance along with the space.If you need IOPS, you need SSDs. The days of getting IOPS from multiple hard disks have been over for a decade.
Ha, no.
SSD arrays absolutely have there place and I have deployed many for clients. But it is not the only performance solution. Like others have said capacity / performance planning is a must to know what you need and what you will need.
Hard drives are for capacity. SSD’s are for performance. This has been settled for a number of years, and is why you see multiple levels of caching in front of any modern enterprise storage system.
Shelves use almost no power; everything is in the drives themselves. I have a 60-bay JBOD that uses ~40W empty. That’s for massive 1400W 208V-only PSUs, backplanes, etc. That said, the ~15 drives I have installed use quite a bit more, so I leave it off 95% of the time. Just fire it up, run a backup to it, shut it down.